The Current State of Selling Stuff and The Ineternets

Drank dat Haterade

So I’m sure by now all of us have heard about the A/C going out at the AT&T center during last nights basketball game. It was HOT! No pun with the Heat playing, but you get it… It was too hot for the ‘King’ to play and he had to be called out of school because of cramps…

I know girls that get cramps and keep playing in the heat.

Ok, so if you haven’t yet heard what happened during the game let me give you the abridged version.

Air Conditioning goes out.

It gets hot.

LeBron ‘King’ James cramps and quits. 3 times.

So, why is this significant here?

Well first I’ll let you skim through the twitter feed of Gatorade, which made this all possible.

It all started with @RyanBKoo. He tweeted to @Gatorade and the rest is an amazing palace of thirst quenching history.

People see the gatorade cups and go after them for lebron cramping up. It’s funny, trolling or not.

But here’s why we love it. It’s not just sports. It’s not just King Baby LeBron. It’s SOCIAL SPORTS! The nature of sports is competition, it’s trash talking, it’s…. it’s…. beating your opponent.

Gatorade apologized for the recent outbreak on social, but I’m sure their community manager got a raise. I hope they did. Understandably at the end of the day, Gatorade is a brand, they have clients, they have partners, they have people they need to keep happy.

They accomplished a few things with these quick witted snappy one-tweeters. Brand Awareness, first of all. It’s not like people didn’t know Gatorade. It’s not like they needed help. People in their commercials SWEAT GATORADE for christs sake. What they DID do in this is humanize them a little bit. They got in a heated sports trash talk. Everyone knows what this is, and has experienced it. Even if you’re not athletic or play sports, everyone has had a little fun trash talk. Men, Women, Boys, Girls, Nerds, Jocks etc. The list goes on. Gatorade showed people that a little trash talk is ok from time to time. They had a great time doing it and we had a great time reading it. #GatorGate and #GatoradeCatch22 have surfaced from it trying to prove that LeBron WAS drinking the juice.

Here’s the thing with this. It doesn’t matter if he was or not. It matters to sports fans everywhere and everyone who loves seeing brands and people interact. It’s personal, it’s community management, it’s doing Social Media RIGHT!

This is what it’s about, GREAT JOB GATORADE! We Applaud you! Better to apologize than tip-toe with boring posts, scheduled HootSuites, tweetdecks and all that other boring shit the ‘safe’ companies are doing.